RAPE AND POLITICS
Johnstone's ongoing crusade to drag all idealism down to the basest of levels continues unabated. This section of part 3 continues with the theme that all of the atrocities associated with the Bosnian Serb genocide campaign were, in fact, dreamed up by a Western media that was (take your pick) naive, gullible, biased, or conceptually boxed in by lazy Nazi parallels.
After my tale of woe two posts ago, I feel a bit sheepish rushing through a section in a perfunctory fashion, but trying to engage Johnstone's argument is more than a little like a cat chasing it's own tail. Since she does not believe there was any campaign of genocide in Bosnia--in fact, since she believes 'ethnic cleansing' was a dark fantasy imposed on the situation by outsiders--she also rejects out of hand any evidence--of which there is plenty--that there was a systematic effort to use rape as a weapon of terror against the Muslims of Bosnia.
Therefore, any efforts to investigate and document those rapes must--in her convoluted worldview--be politically motivated and biased. When you cut through all the bullshit, that what her case boils down to: there was no genocide, therefore no campaign of ethnic cleansing, and therefore the accusations of mass rape against Bosnian Serb units and paramiliataries are slanderous lies.
In case you wonder if I might be exaggerating her position by leaving out some of the nuance, I'll let her tell you:
"Muslim, Serbian, and Croatian women all reported having been raped. The mainstream media chose to play up stories involving Muslim victims, while ignoring the rape of Serbian women. To this bias was added a political twist: rape was "promoted" from a sordid personal crime to a central feature of the strategy of one of the warring parties."
[As an aside--note the quotes around "promoted." An especially snide touch--not out of character, but certainly out of place in this context.]
She backs up her assertions by the usual methods--as noted before, while this book was copyrighted in 2002, Johnstone seems to lack access to any reporting, invesitgation, interviews, or fact-gathering after 1993 or so. Sketchy preliminary reports from the early months of the war (which were often based on first-hand testimony; her absolute disregard for the veracity of first-hand eyewitness reports is pervasive throughout this book--a theme I need to examine at length in the near future) are held up to microscopic scrutiny; no further revelations or data are allowed into the discussion.
Early reports were, of course, inconclusive; they were not, however, groundless, nor were they based on Bosnian government propaganda. The reporters and activists who first brought the issue to the world's attention were not in command of all of the facts, but this does not mean they weren't on to something. Johnstone has chosen her ground wisely--a moral high ground defending impossibly pure standards of neutrality posing as objectivity.
To illustrate how laughably 'even-handed' she expected the media to have been, here is the first sentence of the final paragraph:
"A Serbian spokeswoman, Dr. Ljubica Toholj, claimed that almost all the Serbian women in northern Bosnia had been raped by Muslim mercenaries, who had come from all around the world in order to kill non-Muslims."
Yes, she seems to seriously believe that this charge should have received more consideration from Western NGO's and journalists. This is the same northern Bosnia where, it was well known, the Bosnian Serbs were having a great deal of early military success.
Do I need to say more? It's one thing to confront Johnstone's distortions, misrepresentations, interpretations, and even lies; but when the entire fabric of her argument is constructed from such fantastic notions, it's hard to find a surface solid enough to grasp; it's like wrestling with fog.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Sunday, October 08, 2006
"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Two [8]
3. THE USES OF RAPE
Johnstone, having claimed that the reports of concentration camps in Bosnia were fabricated in order to garner Jewish-American support for Muslim Bosnia and formerly fascist Croatia (oh yes, she really believes this), now goes on to claim that reports of mass rape in Bosnia were likewise fabricated in order to enlist Western feminist support.
The problem, as Johnstone sees it, is that feminists have succeeded too well in sensitizing people to rape; we are, apparantly, too willing to believe accusations of rape. Once again, Johnstone is standing up for those courageous souls willing to look rape victims in the eye and say "Prove it."
The level of sensitivity she displays in this section can best be illustrated by this quote from the third paragraph:
"Women are raped every day in peacetime in the most "advanced" societies. There is no reason to doubt that in wartime, especially during civil war, rape is even more common.
It is nearly impossible for a sane, decent person to understand what it is she might be getting at here. What is her point? "Rape happens"? And what does "there is no reason to doubt" supposed to mean? Is there ANY reason to doubt? At all? I simply cannot conceive of a good reason to write the above two sentences. There is simply no good reason to make such a 'point.'
Having callously dragged this agonizing subject down to the base level of 'bad things happen' she goes on to elaborate on what it means to be "skeptical" in the world of Diana Johnstone:
But aside from the matter of believing or doubting the word of the women themselves, in wartime there is the additional problem of whether or not to believe allegations made in the context of war propaganda."
It is no longer enough that reporters and activists attempt to be clear-headed and in command of as much information as possible; we must now be actively disbelievers. Johnstone, who is very concerned about the feelings of 'the Serbs' as a group is clinically immune to any feelings of empathy for individual women. Perhaps Johnstone merely wants matters of justice decided by Napoleanic Code, where all are guilty--or fabricators of anti-Serb propaganda--until proven innocent.
For all her bombast, however, Johnstone's entire argument rests on a single example--that of Jadranka Cigelj, interviewed by Roy Gutman. She analyzes this case to excrutiating detail, while ignoring the other evidence of mass rape in Bosnia--namely, thousands of known rape victims, along with testimony from the Tribunal. Need I mention that her source of information on Gutman's alleged duplicity comes from "Living Marxism" affiliated pseudo-journalist Thomas Deichmann?
After working through her latest anti-journalist hissy fit (yes, I realize "anti-journalist" is ridiculous, but so is "anti-Serb" in the context she uses it; fair play and all that), this opening section of part 3 [note to self: I must get my terminology straight!] peters out with a lame attempt to portray the press as having been on a wild goose chase for 'authentic rape victims.' Does Johnstone bother talking to, or reading interviews with, any actual rape victims in Bosnia? I think you know the answer to that question.
Johnstone, having claimed that the reports of concentration camps in Bosnia were fabricated in order to garner Jewish-American support for Muslim Bosnia and formerly fascist Croatia (oh yes, she really believes this), now goes on to claim that reports of mass rape in Bosnia were likewise fabricated in order to enlist Western feminist support.
The problem, as Johnstone sees it, is that feminists have succeeded too well in sensitizing people to rape; we are, apparantly, too willing to believe accusations of rape. Once again, Johnstone is standing up for those courageous souls willing to look rape victims in the eye and say "Prove it."
The level of sensitivity she displays in this section can best be illustrated by this quote from the third paragraph:
"Women are raped every day in peacetime in the most "advanced" societies. There is no reason to doubt that in wartime, especially during civil war, rape is even more common.
It is nearly impossible for a sane, decent person to understand what it is she might be getting at here. What is her point? "Rape happens"? And what does "there is no reason to doubt" supposed to mean? Is there ANY reason to doubt? At all? I simply cannot conceive of a good reason to write the above two sentences. There is simply no good reason to make such a 'point.'
Having callously dragged this agonizing subject down to the base level of 'bad things happen' she goes on to elaborate on what it means to be "skeptical" in the world of Diana Johnstone:
But aside from the matter of believing or doubting the word of the women themselves, in wartime there is the additional problem of whether or not to believe allegations made in the context of war propaganda."
It is no longer enough that reporters and activists attempt to be clear-headed and in command of as much information as possible; we must now be actively disbelievers. Johnstone, who is very concerned about the feelings of 'the Serbs' as a group is clinically immune to any feelings of empathy for individual women. Perhaps Johnstone merely wants matters of justice decided by Napoleanic Code, where all are guilty--or fabricators of anti-Serb propaganda--until proven innocent.
For all her bombast, however, Johnstone's entire argument rests on a single example--that of Jadranka Cigelj, interviewed by Roy Gutman. She analyzes this case to excrutiating detail, while ignoring the other evidence of mass rape in Bosnia--namely, thousands of known rape victims, along with testimony from the Tribunal. Need I mention that her source of information on Gutman's alleged duplicity comes from "Living Marxism" affiliated pseudo-journalist Thomas Deichmann?
After working through her latest anti-journalist hissy fit (yes, I realize "anti-journalist" is ridiculous, but so is "anti-Serb" in the context she uses it; fair play and all that), this opening section of part 3 [note to self: I must get my terminology straight!] peters out with a lame attempt to portray the press as having been on a wild goose chase for 'authentic rape victims.' Does Johnstone bother talking to, or reading interviews with, any actual rape victims in Bosnia? I think you know the answer to that question.
"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Two [7]
3. THE USES OF RAPE
I promised myself when I started this project that I would see it out to the bitter end; that no matter how repetitive or offensive the subject matter I would never skip ahead without at least a cursory examination of the contents of a particular section and some comments. Those of you who have stuck it out with me to this point might at times wish I hadn't been so diligent to this point; this stuff gets tedious after awhile. But I believed when I started--and I still believe now--that the lies being propagated by Johnstone and her ilk must be vigorously confronted and systematically discredited. I believe I've shared the anecdote about the offhand comment made by a friend of mine; he was quoting "some UN general from Canada" who had, to my friend's recollection, dismissed the idea of Western intervention in Bosnia because "those people have been at each other's throats for generations" or something very similar. I'm sure you can guess that the general was Lewis MacKenzie. My friend was unaware of MacKenzie's track record in Bosnia and of his ties to nationalist Serb organizations after the war. The war in Bosnia may be over, but the battle to control the history of that war rages on.
That said, this section of the book is testing my commitment. The subject is pretty obvious. Her methods are the usual--extend the sloppy Serbs-as-Nazis metaphors to cover all Western accusations of genocide, or even widespread human rights abuses, against the Bosnian Serb military and leadership so that all charges can be dismissed as "demonizing the Serbs"; cherry-pick isolated incidents and reports out of context; ignoring the testimony given by any actual Bosnian Muslims; and, when all else fails, simply lie. This time the particular subject of her scorn are the stories of mass rape that came out of Bosnia. Even if a person refuses to believe that ethnic cleansing was the goal of the Serbian leadership or that the use of systematic gang rape against large numbers of Muslim women resulted from deliberate policy, there is no doubt that a large number of women were brutally raped in Bosnia. One might think that this is one battle Johnstone might want to avoid fighting. One would be wrong. Her willingness to spit in the face of the women who were brutalized and traumatized in this fashion is stunning.
Honestly, there is part of me that would like nothing more than, having skimmed through this section once, simply move on to section 4 and be done with it. The tedium of confronting this woman's dogged campaign against honest discourse and simple human decency becomes exponentially more maddening when she turns her attention to the "problem" of rape in Bosnia.
All this is my way of saying--I really wanted to post today, but I just don't have the stomach for this crap on such a beautiful day. I'm re-reading this horrid filth one more time, so that tomorrow I can pick up and hopefully breeze through it quickly.
I promised myself when I started this project that I would see it out to the bitter end; that no matter how repetitive or offensive the subject matter I would never skip ahead without at least a cursory examination of the contents of a particular section and some comments. Those of you who have stuck it out with me to this point might at times wish I hadn't been so diligent to this point; this stuff gets tedious after awhile. But I believed when I started--and I still believe now--that the lies being propagated by Johnstone and her ilk must be vigorously confronted and systematically discredited. I believe I've shared the anecdote about the offhand comment made by a friend of mine; he was quoting "some UN general from Canada" who had, to my friend's recollection, dismissed the idea of Western intervention in Bosnia because "those people have been at each other's throats for generations" or something very similar. I'm sure you can guess that the general was Lewis MacKenzie. My friend was unaware of MacKenzie's track record in Bosnia and of his ties to nationalist Serb organizations after the war. The war in Bosnia may be over, but the battle to control the history of that war rages on.
That said, this section of the book is testing my commitment. The subject is pretty obvious. Her methods are the usual--extend the sloppy Serbs-as-Nazis metaphors to cover all Western accusations of genocide, or even widespread human rights abuses, against the Bosnian Serb military and leadership so that all charges can be dismissed as "demonizing the Serbs"; cherry-pick isolated incidents and reports out of context; ignoring the testimony given by any actual Bosnian Muslims; and, when all else fails, simply lie. This time the particular subject of her scorn are the stories of mass rape that came out of Bosnia. Even if a person refuses to believe that ethnic cleansing was the goal of the Serbian leadership or that the use of systematic gang rape against large numbers of Muslim women resulted from deliberate policy, there is no doubt that a large number of women were brutally raped in Bosnia. One might think that this is one battle Johnstone might want to avoid fighting. One would be wrong. Her willingness to spit in the face of the women who were brutalized and traumatized in this fashion is stunning.
Honestly, there is part of me that would like nothing more than, having skimmed through this section once, simply move on to section 4 and be done with it. The tedium of confronting this woman's dogged campaign against honest discourse and simple human decency becomes exponentially more maddening when she turns her attention to the "problem" of rape in Bosnia.
All this is my way of saying--I really wanted to post today, but I just don't have the stomach for this crap on such a beautiful day. I'm re-reading this horrid filth one more time, so that tomorrow I can pick up and hopefully breeze through it quickly.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Two [6]
"BELIEVING THE WORST"
The final section of part 2 ("Creating Public Opinion") kicks off with this smug bit of implied self-congratuation:
"It is sometimes assumed that particular courage is required to tell a terrible story and expose a frightful crime. The opposite assumption would be just as well founded: it may take particular courage to deny a terrible story."
While the cliche of the "Freudian slip" gets overused, I can't help but wonder if either Johnstone or her (clearly overpaid) editor noted that she uses the word "deny" instead of, say, "disprove" or at least "discredit." As frustrated as I get with the woman, I'll give her her due--sometimes, she makes it easy.
Considering that she is implying that she and her fellow genocide deniers are the heroic ones, what does she have to say about the Western reporters who actually went to Bosnia and filed reports on the atrocities she claims never happened? She does, indeed, call out Roy Gutman and David Rohde by name, and her dismissal of their work is beneath contempt. She actually accuses Gutman of merely regurgitating "war propaganda," and flatly declares that Rohde found nothing of substance at Srebrenica. In her universe, being moved by the atrocities they discover somehow turns reporters into liars; her idea of proper journalist is one so "skeptical" that he or she is willing to disbelieve what he or she knows to be true.
That both Gutman and Rohde have been proven by time and further investigation to have been correct means nothing. Throughout Chapter One, I was amazed at how differently Johnstone looked at reality. In Chapter Two, she barely seems acquainted with reality at all.
The final section of part 2 ("Creating Public Opinion") kicks off with this smug bit of implied self-congratuation:
"It is sometimes assumed that particular courage is required to tell a terrible story and expose a frightful crime. The opposite assumption would be just as well founded: it may take particular courage to deny a terrible story."
While the cliche of the "Freudian slip" gets overused, I can't help but wonder if either Johnstone or her (clearly overpaid) editor noted that she uses the word "deny" instead of, say, "disprove" or at least "discredit." As frustrated as I get with the woman, I'll give her her due--sometimes, she makes it easy.
Considering that she is implying that she and her fellow genocide deniers are the heroic ones, what does she have to say about the Western reporters who actually went to Bosnia and filed reports on the atrocities she claims never happened? She does, indeed, call out Roy Gutman and David Rohde by name, and her dismissal of their work is beneath contempt. She actually accuses Gutman of merely regurgitating "war propaganda," and flatly declares that Rohde found nothing of substance at Srebrenica. In her universe, being moved by the atrocities they discover somehow turns reporters into liars; her idea of proper journalist is one so "skeptical" that he or she is willing to disbelieve what he or she knows to be true.
That both Gutman and Rohde have been proven by time and further investigation to have been correct means nothing. Throughout Chapter One, I was amazed at how differently Johnstone looked at reality. In Chapter Two, she barely seems acquainted with reality at all.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Two [5]
"THE NAZI EQUATION"
This next part of section two is predictable--Johnstone looks for examples of over-the-top media coverage from early in the war in order to demonstrate that "the Serbs" were demonized. As usual, she relies on very carefully selected reports in order to skew the numbers while painting a picture of a Western public being duped by a naive, crusading press.
What is most striking about the early paragraphs--in which she claims that fewer than 3,000 civilians were being held in camps in the fall of 1992 (and fewer than half of that number held by Bosnian Serbs)--is how little effort she expends on making such an outrageous claim. I'm not sure if she believes that a summary dismissal is all that is needed, or if this is part of a more clever approach, wherein she implies that the general impression the uninformed reader probably has (garnered from TV news broadcasts) is entirely based on smoke-and-mirrors by pro-Bosnian Western media. That approach would fit her thesis well, but considering how clumsy her polemic has been so far I doubt she intended such a sophisticated critique-by-implication. After all, her entire argument hinges on such a flimsy body of contrary "evidence" that I'd be mighty surprised to see her document these highly doubtful assertions more thoroughly.
So Johnstone relies in a single Red Cross report from early in the war--from a time when access to rural areas was limited at best, more frequently impossible--to claim that there were, in the fall of 1992, a grand total of 25 prison camps holding a total of 2,692 civilians. The woman who claims that even now, ten years after the fighing is over, it is impossible to know howm many people died in the war somehow is convinced that a preliminary estimate during wartime by on organization is definitive.
Not only does she claim that the number of camps and prisoners was small and that the numbers held by all three groups were roughly equal, but she comes very close to endorsing the military logic of imprisoning civilians in prisoner camps. The outbreak of the war is portrayed as a three-way landgrab for "arms factories and mountain passes;" the prisoners were unfortunate civilians of the wrong ethnic group in each area, respectively.
This section meanders quite a bit, and I know why--she does not dare get too close to the "Living Marxism" vs. ITN fiasco, since the courts, and the documentary record, have weighed in decisively on the matter. So she is reduced to skirting around the issue, playing semantic games with the media's choice of language rather than confronting the reality that Western reporters were (admittedly sometimes clumsily) trying to portray.
Instead of acknowledging the completely discredited provence of such statments, she quotes LM-associated journalist Thomas Deichmann as if he were merely another mainstream journalist; his ties to LM and to the Bosnian Serb leadership (he would later appear as a defense witness at the trial of Dusko Tadic, and gave sympathetic interviews to Radovan Karadzic). The lie (not a 'myth,' not a 'misinterpretation'--it's a flat-out lie) that the camp at Trnopolje was actually a safe refuge for Bosnia refuges get regurgitated here as if the ITN libel trial never happened and the extensive research done by Ed Vulliamy and others didn't exist.
In case you were wondering why she spent so much time documenting the relationship between PR firm Ruder Finn and the governments of Bosnia and Croatia, this section is ostensibly the payoff for that 'revelation.' The suggestion that these camps were concentration camps like the ones operated by Nazis apparantly all stems from a sustained propaganda campaign on behalf of their clients. She even goes further, portraying Karadzic as naively trusting, allowing reporters access to these camps out of goodwill. The Croats and Muslims, we are assured, most certainly did not allow such access. So the Serbs accidentally gave the hostile Western press the images they needed to demonize them.
Do I need to spell out all that is wrong here? Is is not a matter of record that there were many, many more camps than 25, and many, many more prisoners held by the RS forces than the 1,203 she allows? Do we need to quote from survivors of those camps (she sure as hell doesn't--she quotes Deichmann about Fikrit Abdic but far be it from her to let Abdic speak for himself)? Do we need to point out that Johnstone implies that ITN filmed misleading images but must avoid discussing the fallout of those accusations?
Most of all, do I need to point out that while it was problematic that the situation became over-generalized with sloppy, inprecise comparisons to the Holocaust, the real issue should be why the hell those people were in the situation they were in. And Johnstone is remarkably blase about that. And she somehow believes that it is possible to defend Serb tactics in the war without troubling about the strategic objectives of that strategy:
"...the most fundamental lie was to present the Serb campaign to secure a swath of defendable territory as a matter of "ideology" and "genocide." "
You and I might think that the reason the Serbs wanted swaths of 'defendable territory' might be worth investigating. You and I, however, are not Diana Johnstone. Her claim that the International Criminal Tribunal was waging a biased, politically motivated attack on Serbia's leadership is laughable considering the evidence at its disposal, but that doesn't seem to trouble her at all.
It's hard to get a handle on this section, as it essentially consists of Johnstone spinning her wheels in the muck of lies and self-delusion that is the stock in trade of the Bosnian Genocide denier. One last quote is worth note, however:
"If justice is the goal, those who advocate an international criminal court should be equally determined to establish an international court where parties considering themselves defamed can bring charges of libel. As it is, there is no recourse for political defamation of foreign leaders or nations."
Read that quote. And again. Think about how completely insane such an idea is, and how completely one's sense of proportion would need to be in order to equate crimes against humanity to supposed slights against political leaders. Think about what a farce such a court would quickly become were this to become a reality.
I didn't make that quote up--it's on pages 74-75 of the book. And yes, she goes on to make her point explicit--she really believes that the world needs a international court of libel so that Karadzic, Plavsic, Mladic, Milosevic (too late for him, I guess) and the Serbian people in general can sue Western leaders and Western journalists for libel. That is the conclusion Johnstone comes to.
This next part of section two is predictable--Johnstone looks for examples of over-the-top media coverage from early in the war in order to demonstrate that "the Serbs" were demonized. As usual, she relies on very carefully selected reports in order to skew the numbers while painting a picture of a Western public being duped by a naive, crusading press.
What is most striking about the early paragraphs--in which she claims that fewer than 3,000 civilians were being held in camps in the fall of 1992 (and fewer than half of that number held by Bosnian Serbs)--is how little effort she expends on making such an outrageous claim. I'm not sure if she believes that a summary dismissal is all that is needed, or if this is part of a more clever approach, wherein she implies that the general impression the uninformed reader probably has (garnered from TV news broadcasts) is entirely based on smoke-and-mirrors by pro-Bosnian Western media. That approach would fit her thesis well, but considering how clumsy her polemic has been so far I doubt she intended such a sophisticated critique-by-implication. After all, her entire argument hinges on such a flimsy body of contrary "evidence" that I'd be mighty surprised to see her document these highly doubtful assertions more thoroughly.
So Johnstone relies in a single Red Cross report from early in the war--from a time when access to rural areas was limited at best, more frequently impossible--to claim that there were, in the fall of 1992, a grand total of 25 prison camps holding a total of 2,692 civilians. The woman who claims that even now, ten years after the fighing is over, it is impossible to know howm many people died in the war somehow is convinced that a preliminary estimate during wartime by on organization is definitive.
Not only does she claim that the number of camps and prisoners was small and that the numbers held by all three groups were roughly equal, but she comes very close to endorsing the military logic of imprisoning civilians in prisoner camps. The outbreak of the war is portrayed as a three-way landgrab for "arms factories and mountain passes;" the prisoners were unfortunate civilians of the wrong ethnic group in each area, respectively.
This section meanders quite a bit, and I know why--she does not dare get too close to the "Living Marxism" vs. ITN fiasco, since the courts, and the documentary record, have weighed in decisively on the matter. So she is reduced to skirting around the issue, playing semantic games with the media's choice of language rather than confronting the reality that Western reporters were (admittedly sometimes clumsily) trying to portray.
Instead of acknowledging the completely discredited provence of such statments, she quotes LM-associated journalist Thomas Deichmann as if he were merely another mainstream journalist; his ties to LM and to the Bosnian Serb leadership (he would later appear as a defense witness at the trial of Dusko Tadic, and gave sympathetic interviews to Radovan Karadzic). The lie (not a 'myth,' not a 'misinterpretation'--it's a flat-out lie) that the camp at Trnopolje was actually a safe refuge for Bosnia refuges get regurgitated here as if the ITN libel trial never happened and the extensive research done by Ed Vulliamy and others didn't exist.
In case you were wondering why she spent so much time documenting the relationship between PR firm Ruder Finn and the governments of Bosnia and Croatia, this section is ostensibly the payoff for that 'revelation.' The suggestion that these camps were concentration camps like the ones operated by Nazis apparantly all stems from a sustained propaganda campaign on behalf of their clients. She even goes further, portraying Karadzic as naively trusting, allowing reporters access to these camps out of goodwill. The Croats and Muslims, we are assured, most certainly did not allow such access. So the Serbs accidentally gave the hostile Western press the images they needed to demonize them.
Do I need to spell out all that is wrong here? Is is not a matter of record that there were many, many more camps than 25, and many, many more prisoners held by the RS forces than the 1,203 she allows? Do we need to quote from survivors of those camps (she sure as hell doesn't--she quotes Deichmann about Fikrit Abdic but far be it from her to let Abdic speak for himself)? Do we need to point out that Johnstone implies that ITN filmed misleading images but must avoid discussing the fallout of those accusations?
Most of all, do I need to point out that while it was problematic that the situation became over-generalized with sloppy, inprecise comparisons to the Holocaust, the real issue should be why the hell those people were in the situation they were in. And Johnstone is remarkably blase about that. And she somehow believes that it is possible to defend Serb tactics in the war without troubling about the strategic objectives of that strategy:
"...the most fundamental lie was to present the Serb campaign to secure a swath of defendable territory as a matter of "ideology" and "genocide." "
You and I might think that the reason the Serbs wanted swaths of 'defendable territory' might be worth investigating. You and I, however, are not Diana Johnstone. Her claim that the International Criminal Tribunal was waging a biased, politically motivated attack on Serbia's leadership is laughable considering the evidence at its disposal, but that doesn't seem to trouble her at all.
It's hard to get a handle on this section, as it essentially consists of Johnstone spinning her wheels in the muck of lies and self-delusion that is the stock in trade of the Bosnian Genocide denier. One last quote is worth note, however:
"If justice is the goal, those who advocate an international criminal court should be equally determined to establish an international court where parties considering themselves defamed can bring charges of libel. As it is, there is no recourse for political defamation of foreign leaders or nations."
Read that quote. And again. Think about how completely insane such an idea is, and how completely one's sense of proportion would need to be in order to equate crimes against humanity to supposed slights against political leaders. Think about what a farce such a court would quickly become were this to become a reality.
I didn't make that quote up--it's on pages 74-75 of the book. And yes, she goes on to make her point explicit--she really believes that the world needs a international court of libel so that Karadzic, Plavsic, Mladic, Milosevic (too late for him, I guess) and the Serbian people in general can sue Western leaders and Western journalists for libel. That is the conclusion Johnstone comes to.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Two [4]
2. CREATING PUBLIC OPINION
You can guess what this section is about. The first part barely merits discussion, so I'll merely summarize the contents--Johnstone spends three pages huffing indignantly about the public relations firm Ruder Finn, hired in 1991 by the Croatian government and then in 1992 by the Bosnian government.
Johnstone is shocked that governments hire public relations firms, and clearly believes that by detailing some of the actions Ruder Finn took on behalf of their client, the reader will be equally shocked to learn that public relations firms engage in...public relations.
One sentence merits notice, however:
"In October 1992, Ruder Finn took up the job of public relations for the ethnic Albanian separatists in the Serbian province of Kosovo."
I don't believe it's any accident that Johnstone--who approves heartily of majority-Serb areas breaking away from Croatia and Bosnia--is careful to describe Kosovo as a Serbian province. Apparantly, while the internal borders of Yugoslavia's republics were artificial and could easily be ignored, the inclusion of Kosovo as part of Serbia is permenant and unquestioned.
Other than that, there isn't much of note in the first part of section 2. It's mildly amusing witnessing Johnstone--who continually scolds "the West" for being naive while presenting herself as a cool-headed voice of fact-based reason--getting riled up at these unexceptional examples of how governments do business in the mass media-driven real world. Whenever she's unsuccessful at avoiding it, reality has a way of getting under her skin.
You can guess what this section is about. The first part barely merits discussion, so I'll merely summarize the contents--Johnstone spends three pages huffing indignantly about the public relations firm Ruder Finn, hired in 1991 by the Croatian government and then in 1992 by the Bosnian government.
Johnstone is shocked that governments hire public relations firms, and clearly believes that by detailing some of the actions Ruder Finn took on behalf of their client, the reader will be equally shocked to learn that public relations firms engage in...public relations.
One sentence merits notice, however:
"In October 1992, Ruder Finn took up the job of public relations for the ethnic Albanian separatists in the Serbian province of Kosovo."
I don't believe it's any accident that Johnstone--who approves heartily of majority-Serb areas breaking away from Croatia and Bosnia--is careful to describe Kosovo as a Serbian province. Apparantly, while the internal borders of Yugoslavia's republics were artificial and could easily be ignored, the inclusion of Kosovo as part of Serbia is permenant and unquestioned.
Other than that, there isn't much of note in the first part of section 2. It's mildly amusing witnessing Johnstone--who continually scolds "the West" for being naive while presenting herself as a cool-headed voice of fact-based reason--getting riled up at these unexceptional examples of how governments do business in the mass media-driven real world. Whenever she's unsuccessful at avoiding it, reality has a way of getting under her skin.
Monday, October 02, 2006
"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Two [3]
1. MANICHEAN MEDIA (continued)
Johnstone revisits the three infamous market massacres, juxtaposing the timing of each incident against supposedly crucial moments in the war. These incidents--May 27, 1992, February 5, 1994, and August 28, 1995, have been widely discussed and investigated. It is not worth the effort of engaging Johnstone's "argument" on this issue; she doesn't really have one. Any student of the Bosnian war knows that Karadzic always had an ever-changing explanation for how and why "the Muslims" had bombed their own people, and of course UN General Lewis MacKenzie was always eager to make such accusations himself. (By the way--does anyone know if General MacKenzie's pro-Serb loyalties predated his time in Bosnia? I'd be interested to know).
At any rate, this is Johnstone, and if you've been following my critique at all you can pretty much guess at the 'depth' and intellectual honesty of her analysis. Revisiting my point from yesterday's post, there are NO footnotes, no naming of names, no chronology, and most tellingly, no follow-up. I can't make this point often enough--this book was written in 2002. There is no excuse for regurgitating some of the uncertainties of wartime reporting that were inevitable at the time. Johnstone relies on then-contemporary doubts which have since been largely clarified.
The salient point here, then, is not the validity of the ridiculous claim that all three of these highly publicized bombings were orchestrated by the Bosnian Army--other observers have examined these incidents with far more balance and integrity than Johnstone is capable of. Her critique of what she considers lazy and biased media predisposition to blame everything on "the Serbs" contains no real insight per se, but her clumsy attempt at a sophisticated and nuanced analysis exposes her dishonesty, biases, and moral myopia quite succinctly.
First, she scolds the media for a failure to think critically about these massacres:
"While serious independent investigation of such incidents was beyond the capacity of journalists in war conditions, critical analysis is always possible. An unbiased analysis should take into account these considerations:"
It's always grimly amusing to read Johnstone patting herself on the back for being "unbiased." At any rate, what are these considerations? She lists five:
"1. Each of these atrocities was committed at a crucial moment for the future of the conflict: on the eve of an international decision to take punitive measures against the Bosnian Serbs. In each case the atrocity became a clinching argument for such measures. The timing could not have been worse for the Serb side, or better for the Muslim side."
Was there ever a time during the entire war when the international community wasn't contemplating taking punitive measures against the Bosnian Serbs?
"2. One element in deciding who may have committed an anonymous crime is motive. The Muslim motive would have been to trigger international action of their side. The Bosnian Serbs had nothing to gain and much to lose from those particular attacks at those particular times."
It is worth noting that the Bosnian Serb soldiers who manned the artillery pieces around Sarajevo were known for drinking continuously throughout the day.
"3. Staging attacks on one's own side for propaganda purposes is an aspect of psychological war familiar to specialists. It is called "black propaganda."
4. It may be hard to imagine that the Muslims would kill "their own people." However, in Bosnia there were several thousand mujahidin from Muslim countries, including veterans of the war in Afghanistan and Algerian islamic terrorists, for whom Sarajevo's fun-loving, often hard-drinking inhabitants were not exactly "their own people." For the sake of the cause, such foreign fighters might have few qualms about killing a number of Sarajevo civilians, few of whom were likely to be devout Muslims."
The mujahideen fighters were not known to be in Sarajevo. There were often tensions between Bosnian Muslim soldiers and the mujahideen; it is stretching your imagination to the limit to suggest that Bosnian Army soldiers--led by General Jovan Divjak, a Serb--would sit idly by while foreign fundamentalists deliberately slaughtered their fellow citizens.
Assuming, that is, that such precision was possible. Mortars are not smart bombs. The conspiracy Johnstone is alleging requires an element of precision and sophisticated ordinance that wasn't there. Finally:
"5. The Izetbegovic government, throughout the war, refused proposals to make Sarajevo a genuinely open, that is a demilitarized, city. "Beseiged Sarajevo" was a key asset in the Muslim strategy of winning foreign sympathy and support. It diverted attention from other fronts where Muslims were fighting more aggressively and with success."
Time and time again--just when I think I'm used to Johnstone's remarkable capacity to put the wagon in front of the mule, she manages to surprise me anew. Of course the Bosnian Serbs wanted to demilitarize Sarajevo--that was the first step towards partitioning the symbol of multicultural Bosnia and the capital of the republic; not to mention freeing up troops and weapons for other fronts. Why a UN member state should be expected to demilitarize its own capital--under assault from an enemy army--during a war is frankly inconceivable.
Johnstone has elsewhere quoted approvingly (and, needless to say, very selectively) from Silber and Little's Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation; it seems fitting to me to let them have the last word on this subject:
[from page 310]
"The common sense observation that if you fire around 500,000 mortar, artillery and tank rounds into a small city over twnety-two months (as the Bosnian Serbs did)--many of these randomly lobbed into civilian areas--sooner or later one will land somewhere where crowds are gathered, was swept away in the ensuing row. A walk down any side street in Sarajevo provides visible evidence that nowhere was safe from the random mortar: the city's streets are pockmarked everywhere with the distinctive splatter of the mortar impact point. The local people called these imprints "Sarajevo rose"--the color of blood. By February 1994, you could barely walk more than a few meters without passing one."
Conspiracy theorists hate to hear this, but it's true--usually, the simplist and most obvious answer is the correct one.
Johnstone revisits the three infamous market massacres, juxtaposing the timing of each incident against supposedly crucial moments in the war. These incidents--May 27, 1992, February 5, 1994, and August 28, 1995, have been widely discussed and investigated. It is not worth the effort of engaging Johnstone's "argument" on this issue; she doesn't really have one. Any student of the Bosnian war knows that Karadzic always had an ever-changing explanation for how and why "the Muslims" had bombed their own people, and of course UN General Lewis MacKenzie was always eager to make such accusations himself. (By the way--does anyone know if General MacKenzie's pro-Serb loyalties predated his time in Bosnia? I'd be interested to know).
At any rate, this is Johnstone, and if you've been following my critique at all you can pretty much guess at the 'depth' and intellectual honesty of her analysis. Revisiting my point from yesterday's post, there are NO footnotes, no naming of names, no chronology, and most tellingly, no follow-up. I can't make this point often enough--this book was written in 2002. There is no excuse for regurgitating some of the uncertainties of wartime reporting that were inevitable at the time. Johnstone relies on then-contemporary doubts which have since been largely clarified.
The salient point here, then, is not the validity of the ridiculous claim that all three of these highly publicized bombings were orchestrated by the Bosnian Army--other observers have examined these incidents with far more balance and integrity than Johnstone is capable of. Her critique of what she considers lazy and biased media predisposition to blame everything on "the Serbs" contains no real insight per se, but her clumsy attempt at a sophisticated and nuanced analysis exposes her dishonesty, biases, and moral myopia quite succinctly.
First, she scolds the media for a failure to think critically about these massacres:
"While serious independent investigation of such incidents was beyond the capacity of journalists in war conditions, critical analysis is always possible. An unbiased analysis should take into account these considerations:"
It's always grimly amusing to read Johnstone patting herself on the back for being "unbiased." At any rate, what are these considerations? She lists five:
"1. Each of these atrocities was committed at a crucial moment for the future of the conflict: on the eve of an international decision to take punitive measures against the Bosnian Serbs. In each case the atrocity became a clinching argument for such measures. The timing could not have been worse for the Serb side, or better for the Muslim side."
Was there ever a time during the entire war when the international community wasn't contemplating taking punitive measures against the Bosnian Serbs?
"2. One element in deciding who may have committed an anonymous crime is motive. The Muslim motive would have been to trigger international action of their side. The Bosnian Serbs had nothing to gain and much to lose from those particular attacks at those particular times."
It is worth noting that the Bosnian Serb soldiers who manned the artillery pieces around Sarajevo were known for drinking continuously throughout the day.
"3. Staging attacks on one's own side for propaganda purposes is an aspect of psychological war familiar to specialists. It is called "black propaganda."
4. It may be hard to imagine that the Muslims would kill "their own people." However, in Bosnia there were several thousand mujahidin from Muslim countries, including veterans of the war in Afghanistan and Algerian islamic terrorists, for whom Sarajevo's fun-loving, often hard-drinking inhabitants were not exactly "their own people." For the sake of the cause, such foreign fighters might have few qualms about killing a number of Sarajevo civilians, few of whom were likely to be devout Muslims."
The mujahideen fighters were not known to be in Sarajevo. There were often tensions between Bosnian Muslim soldiers and the mujahideen; it is stretching your imagination to the limit to suggest that Bosnian Army soldiers--led by General Jovan Divjak, a Serb--would sit idly by while foreign fundamentalists deliberately slaughtered their fellow citizens.
Assuming, that is, that such precision was possible. Mortars are not smart bombs. The conspiracy Johnstone is alleging requires an element of precision and sophisticated ordinance that wasn't there. Finally:
"5. The Izetbegovic government, throughout the war, refused proposals to make Sarajevo a genuinely open, that is a demilitarized, city. "Beseiged Sarajevo" was a key asset in the Muslim strategy of winning foreign sympathy and support. It diverted attention from other fronts where Muslims were fighting more aggressively and with success."
Time and time again--just when I think I'm used to Johnstone's remarkable capacity to put the wagon in front of the mule, she manages to surprise me anew. Of course the Bosnian Serbs wanted to demilitarize Sarajevo--that was the first step towards partitioning the symbol of multicultural Bosnia and the capital of the republic; not to mention freeing up troops and weapons for other fronts. Why a UN member state should be expected to demilitarize its own capital--under assault from an enemy army--during a war is frankly inconceivable.
Johnstone has elsewhere quoted approvingly (and, needless to say, very selectively) from Silber and Little's Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation; it seems fitting to me to let them have the last word on this subject:
[from page 310]
"The common sense observation that if you fire around 500,000 mortar, artillery and tank rounds into a small city over twnety-two months (as the Bosnian Serbs did)--many of these randomly lobbed into civilian areas--sooner or later one will land somewhere where crowds are gathered, was swept away in the ensuing row. A walk down any side street in Sarajevo provides visible evidence that nowhere was safe from the random mortar: the city's streets are pockmarked everywhere with the distinctive splatter of the mortar impact point. The local people called these imprints "Sarajevo rose"--the color of blood. By February 1994, you could barely walk more than a few meters without passing one."
Conspiracy theorists hate to hear this, but it's true--usually, the simplist and most obvious answer is the correct one.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)